Thursday, May 28, 2015

Their story is pegged to the development that one of the appropriatees -- Selena Mooney, who founded the website SuicideGirls -- has started selling her appropriated picture ... for $90, as opposed to the $90,000 Prince gets.

NYU's Chris Sprigman tweets: "I condemn Suicide Girls for making money from an Instagram that was worthless until Richard Prince made it valuable. Shame on them."

That's funny, but isn't it also true? Doesn't the price disparity between the two identical images tell us something important about what's going on? Doesn't it make the simple "theft" model look a little silly?

UPDATE: Scott Indrisek gets it too: "Can't believe [Richard Prince] stole my Instagram photo just mere seconds before I was about to print it out and sell it for $90,000."

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik has a riff on art and money pegged to last week's $179 million Picasso sale, in the course of which he mentions Jerrold Nadler's campaign for resale royalties for artists. He summarizes the issue nicely:

"It’s a complex issue. Copyright law is called copyright law because it is meant to be concerned with the problem of copies. Since books and records can be copied freely (as, indeed, they are, online), we impose a royalty on the copyist in order to insure that the originator isn’t cheated for his labor. The deal that visual artists typically make with their buyers is different: the artist sells the original and reaps the benefit. The logic here is that if the owner of a Jeff Koons sells it at auction for a profit, that will be reflected in the next Koons that Jeff Koons makes; the 'royalty' that he reaps is the increase in the value of his next work of art, sold to the next individual buyer."

But he comes out in favor of the idea:

"Yet the idea of paying royalties to artists probably still resonates emotionally with most of us. That’s because what distinguishes a work of visual art is ... that it is made by a singular hand (or, at any rate, comes from a singular vision), whose claim on it lingers, even after it changes owners. A work by Chuck Close can be a wall decoration, an investment, a legacy, and a tax deduction, but, before it is any of these, it is, and remains, a Chuck Close. ... Essentially, what artists are asking for, through Nadler’s bill, is little more than the courtesy of a tip."

I think he refers to it as a tip because, under Nadler's version, it's capped at $35,000. But that, I think, is the problem with Nadler's approach: our moral intuition is strongest when the increase in value is greatest -- where the price is 100 times what the artist was paid for it, or more -- and, in those cases, where the collector has made ten-, twenty-, thirty-million dollars, a $35,000 "tip" does little to balance out the equities of the situation.

UPDATE: Michael Rushton is not convinced by Gopnik's argument: "'Moral intuition' is evasive."

So, as mentioned in the Mark Stryker article I linked to in the update to this post yesterday, the Detroit Institute has apparently walked back the claim that it plans to sell a Van Gogh. But the larger point remains: the D.I.A. will, at some point, resume the ordinary, common, nothing-touchy-about, totally-non-controversial-within-the-museum-world practice of routinely selling works from the collection and using the proceeds to buy different art.

The question is: is that consistent with what they told the world during the bankruptcy proceeding, in their (highly successful) campaign to keep the art from the reach of creditors?

In fairness to museum director Graham Beal, as he pointed out to Nicholas O'Donnell earlier this week, he was clear in his public statements that he was not arguing for a categorical ban on all sales; his position was just that the museum would not breach "the most fundamental tenet of the art museum world: that art in the collection can only be sold to acquire more (and better) art."

On the other hand, there were other statements, at least as filtered through the media, where the message was more muddled. Here, for example, is the New York Times reporting that "[t]he museum’s director, Graham W. J. Beal, has said that any sale of art will most likely lead to the museum’s dissolution." Now, presumably he meant any sale of art other than those where the proceeds are used to buy other art, but you can understand how some people might have missed that. And here is another example from the Times of "museum officials" warning "if any pieces are sold the museum will no longer be able to attract donors and will immediately lose a crucial stream of tax revenue voted in last year by three Michigan counties." In the next paragraph, Beal himself is quoted as saying "such a loss of operating revenue and donations...would almost certainly lead to what he called a 'nonprofit controlled liquidation' of the museum." Now again, what those museum officials must have meant is that if any pieces are sold and the proceeds are not used to buy art, the museum will no longer be able to attract donors etc., almost certainly leading to a nonprofit controlled liquidation, but you can forgive someone for not catching that nuance.

But let's leave that to the side and grant that Beal and other opponents of sale during the bankruptcy were perfectly consistent: they never said that all sales were prohibited; they simply said that sales other than to buy more art were prohibited.

The larger issue, though (and I've been banging on this for years here), is that the people who hold that view fail to see that the same reasons they give for why art can't be sold for non-art buying purposes apply with equal force to sales to buy more art.
You say art can't be sold to pay operating expenses because it's held in the public trust for future generations?

Well, that applies to works sold to buy more art too. Isn't this Van Gogh held in the public trust for future generations?

You say art can't be sold because it will discourage people from donating art in the future?

Well, that applies to works sold to buy more art too. What's the basis for the assumption that donors don't mind it when you sell off the art they donated as long as you use the sales proceeds to buy art (different art, art that you are implicitly declaring you like better than the art they gave you)?

What defenders of the Beal view of deaccessioning are unable to do is point to a reason why sales for non-art buying purposes are wrong that does not also apply to sales for art-buying purposes. At least I've never seen one.

It's kind of like if I called you up this morning and asked if you wanted to play tennis, and you replied no and, when I asked why, you said "Because it's the weekend." Then, tomorrow, I happen to pass by the tennis courts and see you playing with someone else and say, "Wait a minute, I thought you don't play on the weekends?" And you respond: "No, Sundays are okay."

Graham Beal doesn't want works to be sold for operating expenses, or to pay creditors, or to keep from going out of business, because it's the weekend. But he's fine with selling that Van Gogh on Sunday.

No wonder "some observers" are critical of "what can appear to the public to be confusing or contradictory rules concerning deaccessioning and the supposedly sacrosanct notion of holding work in the public trust."

Friday, May 15, 2015

One thing you see in the Detroit News article yesterday, and even more so in Graham Beal's response to Nicholas O'Donnell here, is the usual bait-and-switch from the museums.

On the one hand, if a museum goes to sell something to, for example, avoid going out of business, we hear: OH MY GOD THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER THAT WORK IS HELD IN TRUST FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS WE WILL NEVER GET OVER ITS LOSS NO ONE WILL EVER DONATE WORK TO A MUSEUM EVER AGAIN IF THEY KNOW THE WORK CAN BE SOLD OFF FIRE UP THE SANCTION MACHINE.

(We saw a lot of this in Detroit, which I will return to in a later post.)

But when a museum decides to sell a Van Gogh, or a Monet, or Hopper, and use the proceeds to buy art, then we hear: "What? What's the big deal? Museums sell work all the time. Don't be so touchy. You didn't think we were serious about that 'public trust' thing, did you? Why would it matter to potential donors that their work might be sold? Where'd you ever get that silly idea? It's no big deal. Come on. Grow up."

Saturday, May 09, 2015

A strange note has crept into some of the coverage I've seen of this week's 9th Circuit decision in the California resale royalty. Some people seem to be reading it as making California a less hospitable place to sell art than it was before. (Here is one example: Will High-Priced Art Ever Be Auctioned Again in California?) But this case is not about sales within California. Before this case, the law applied to sales within California and sales outside California by California residents. The 9th Circuit has now affirmed the lower court ruling striking down the second part ... which means the law still applies to sales within California. Nothing has changed on that front. So if high-priced art is never going to be auctioned again in California, it's not because of this week's decision.